


when you smile (I fall apart)

by aerially



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Adopted Peter, Father!Tony - Freeform, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Mentions of Death, Not Steve Friendly, Peter Needs a Hug, Tony Needs a Hug, i love how these tags are everywhere, no homecoming spoilers I swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-12-06 04:05:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11592579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerially/pseuds/aerially
Summary: When golden child Peter breaks curfew, Tony Stark is at a loss. He's new to being a father, doesn't quite know how to love another human being, doesn't know how to pick up the pieces just yet.Where Peter flounders, and Tony tries to reel him back in again.





	when you smile (I fall apart)

The third time Tony emerges from his workshop to dump cold coffee in the sink, it’s uncharacteristic silence that finally wrenches ahold of his focus, in time to burgeoning panic.

The paneled glass windows of the penthouse suite running floor to ceiling is a myriad of reflections, dotted city lights glowing tenaciously in the dark, and he vaguely recalls stumbling out of his workshop earlier as the last of the sunrays sink over the horizon.

Across the room, the couch remains unoccupied, untouched by a certain bumbling little brown-haired teen too energized for sleep. 

“F.R.I.D.A.Y.,” he calls out, setting his mug into the sink, “What time is it?”

_“It is 12:45am. Would you like to rescind your alarm set for 6am?”_

Tony pauses, the words jolting a stark reminder. _6am_. In a sudden bout of impulsiveness, he’d asked F.R.I.D.A.Y. to set an alarm thirty minutes before Peter’s own, if only so he could make passable breakfast for the boy before school, something Howard had left to Jarvis, their then butler.

It was a carefully planned strategy: ten minutes to rouse him from sleep or work, five for the inevitable procrastination and subsequent guilt, another five to look up quick and easy recipes, and the last ten to give up and pour cereal into a bowl while cleaning up the messes of failed attempts, because Tony hasn’t got a single domestic bone in his body. 

And yet, it would all be for naught with the boy in question still glaringly absent from the penthouse, forty-five minutes past midnight. _On a school night no less_ , he adds mentally.

There’s bristling anxiety creeping into the pounding in his skull, just brushing short of hysteria, as his overactive genius brain starts conjuring up a million possibilities of Peter, _lying curled up in an unnaturally broken heap in his own blood_ — 

“ _Boss?”_ F.R.I.D.A.Y.’s voice resounds through the room, startling him out of his thoughts.

He chokes down the nausea, grappling at the kitchen counter with bloodless fingers.

“Keep the alarm. And run the tracker on Peter’s phone. I need a location.”

The room falls into unsettling silence again as the A.I. complies with his orders, and Tony tries to convince himself that he’s overthinking _again._ It has been barely four months since the adoption went through, and Tony added _father_ to his list of titles, so it is completely natural that his nerves are out of whack, jittery thoughts snapping back and forth to revolve around the younger out of his volition. Just earlier today, Tony had sat through a meeting with the board wondering if Peter would like pineapples on his pizza, and effectively ignoring the ongoing discourse. Pepper hadn’t been pleased.

Peter is fine, he has to be. He held his own against almost half the Avengers team, he can handle a couple hours out in New York City. Even if those couple of hours are unpermitted and way after his curfew. Right?

 _“I am unable to reach the tracker,”_ when F.R.I.D.A.Y. finally breaks the silence, Tony thinks he detects a hint of worry in her voice. “ _It seems his phone might be turned off.”_  

Or thrown out a window. Or crushed underfoot by someone with bloody fingers tightening around Peter’s windpipe and a hand closed around a knife twisted into his stomach. 

Tony forces himself to swallow down a ragged breath, and it slices all the way down his throat. “Run a facial recognition scan. Find out where Peter was last seen.” 

He snags a tablet computer on his way to the couch, jelly knees sinking weightlessly to dizzying gravity. The A.I. pulls up the data, and a grainy image slides into place on the screen, lighting up in holographic projection.

It’s taken in the midst of bustling Times Square, dazzling colors and garish lights glinting zealously over the crowd surging through the streets; a typical night for the sleepless city of New York.

 _But why…?_  

The answer emerges in glaring clarity when Tony flicks over to the very next image. Near the corner of the picture is the familiar build of his missing teen, melting into a half-shadowed silhouette.

He heaves out a huff of relief, and then promptly holds his breath again.

Peter is standing by the doorway of _night club_ , face upturned to someone just out of frame, and he’s _six years_ away from a legal drinking age. Not that the very same law had stopped Tony when he was a recalcitrant teenager with too much money to spare and nothing but the burn of alcohol to fill the emptiness lodged somewhere between his ribcage and his heart, but he hadn’t wanted Peter to flounder and pitch headfirst into the same potholes he had, and really, four months is too soon for Tony to be _failing as a father_.

He rises to his feet and stalks to the elevator with a renewed vigor. 

_“Shall I prepare a suit?”_

“It’s fine. I’ll be taking one of the cars.”

He descends to the garage, trying to ignore the growing tide of his own thoughts, careening over each other into a steady cacophony. Unlike the spiked panic that had jostled his mind to frazzling shreds, worry bears a steady thrum in his skull, threading between the tipping balance of guilt and frustration and disconcertedness to burn into the ache of clenched fingers around his car door.

He slips in around the driver’s side and slams the door shut more forcefully than he ever had — these cars had been his babies, before Peter had come along and overthrown the ordered chaos in Tony’s life.

And now, evidently, has started on his teenage rebellious streak to bulldoze it into the living-nightmare lane.

He shakes his head, tries to focus, and pulls the car into drive. There will be time for yelling, but first, he has to get there without driving himself into a ditch.

 

* * *

 

The bouncer of the night club looks faintly awed in the ricochet of colored spotlights as he lets Tony in, wincing under the rattling bass of blaring music. 

Sloshing alcohol and sweaty bodies gyrating clumsily to the beat crams into his vision everywhere he turns, and he wonders, not for the first time tonight, why Peter, who still stammers around strangers, would be here, amidst too many people in too little clothes, of all places. 

He shifts past the mass of people, ducking under flailing arms and whirling around swaying torsos, in the vague direction of private rooms in the back. A girl, probably somewhere in her early twenties, stumbles into his arms, tangled orange hair luminescent in the flashing dark, and it takes all of his willpower not to shove her to the ground in his haste.

He stops outside one of the rooms, momentarily stopping to consider his options. It had been a niggling hunch that had urged him here, but Tony had always been more of a logic-inspired strategist.

Following hunches is Steve’s thing. 

The thought is a bittersweet slice through the disquiet of his mind, running like branding fire over old scabs and healing scars. He tries to stop the memory before it surfaces, but it does anyways, rebounding with a vengeance: sitting at his desk, bruised and battered after a fight with his parents’ killer, and his once-friend, glancing through the letter that had replaced his entire family. 

 _Except for Peter,_ his brain supplies, and it’s enough to jerk him out of his self pity long enough to shove his way through the first door, only to grimace at the couple inside, scrabbling at each other with enough force to hurt. They turn, red raked down their backs to mark the trails of too-sharp nails, and stare, mouths falling open in unison.

He backs away, and slips around the second door with a hand braced to his eyes in anticipation. When no gasps of shock welcome his intrusion, he peeks between his fingers, and then lets them fall completely to his side.

Huddled into the corner is the familiar hunch of shoulders, and dark brown hair buried into knees clutched to a shuddering chest.

“ _It’s just that, when whatever happened happened, it’s like my senses have been dialed to eleven. There’s… There’s way too much input so… the-they just help me focus.” Peter said, snatching his suit out of Tony’s hands._  

Tony glances back to the spiraling lights arcing across the club, and the near inaudible cheers under the raucous music, and thinks there’s no way Peter, with all his enhanced senses, isn’t suffering from a sensory overload.

He walks up to the boy, sets a hand on his shoulder, and promptly gets shoved back against the wall, Peter’s innate defensive instincts propelling a fist towards his sternum. He catches it and holds it off just for long enough to shout, “Stop, it’s me!”

The teen stills in his grasp, recognition flickering in his eyes.

“Tony?”

The recognition segues to shame, and Peter drops his head as he takes a step back and away from his adopted father, wrapping his own arms around himself.

Here, hunched into himself, Peter looks so small and meek that Tony is harshly reminded that Peter is _just a child_. A child who can stop a bus and solve complicated math equations way above his grade, sure, but a child who’s fumbling through puberty and the complex jungle of high school and struggling to find his own identity; a child who’d lost his parents and his aunt and uncle, and whose only family left was Tony bad-decisions-arrogant-heartless Stark, who couldn’t possibly measure up as a role model anymore than he knows how to be a father.

Tony had been in Peter’s shoes too many times to count, and then some: getting drunk on the volatility of his youth, and on the sweetness of forbidden alcohol, weaving in and out between plastered friends, soaring on the buoy of music.

The difference is, Peter had retreated into himself in a corner of a club like a helpless puppy.

Tony tugs the boy into his embrace, temporarily letting the anger drain away to make way for relief. Lets himself take in the face that Peter’s alive, he’s intact, he’s safe. Tony’s got him, he’s got him now, and it’s okay.

The difference is, no one had cared enough to pick Tony up again.

Tony tips Peter’s face back up, watches his teeth sink into his lips to screw up in guilt, and says, “Let’s go home.”

 

* * *

 

The ride back home is silent. The radio is on, dialed down into a steady thrum of indiscernible words and blasé music that Tony dismisses for toneless white noise. Just enough to keep the silence off the edge of stifling. Just enough to drown out the thoughts he’s not ready to consider.

He glances to the side, where Peter is slumped bonelessly into the passenger seat, hands tucked under his thighs, head bowed under insurmountable weight.

“Wanna tell me why you were there after curfew?”

The teen shuffles in his seat, and if Tony doesn’t know better, almost seem to sink deeper into the leather cushioning, gaze lodged somewhere between twisting feet.

More silence, and Tony wonders if this is when he’s supposed to start yelling, start making demands and start dishing out threats and lectures and groundings like candy on Halloween.

In his windshield, the traffic light flickers red to green. He steps down on the pedal, grateful just to have _something_ to do. 

“I- I’m sorry.”

The words are whispered, so soft they are almost imperceptible even over the faint buzz of music, and Tony wonders if he’d imagined it between thundering thoughts. 

But then Peter clears his throat, and says, “I didn’t mean to- to make you come get me, Mr Stark. I- I know you’re really busy, working on projects and all, a-and, Happy told me that you have a huge deadline coming up and I just didn’t — ”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have done it.” 

The teen falls abruptly silent at the quiet words, still in the passenger seat. Somewhere in the background, instruments mount on a building crescendo. Tony grips the steering wheel tight enough to hurt, and tries not to look like he’s scrambling for words from an empty repository.

 _Tony, you’re being uncharacteristically non-hyperverbal,_ Natasha’s voice resounds in his head. Even now, months after the things had fallen apart in Germany, months after he’d lost the family he’d come to accept, the memory is still vividly clear in the depths of his mind, unaffected by the wear and tear of time.

Here, Tony still has the nuances of her voice locked in memory down to a T, as if the lilting words had just slipped from between her lips to fill the halting silence, as if she’s not an absent figure in a painstakingly furnished room left vacant, as if she hadn’t walked out of his life without so much as a goodbye.

Out of that wreckage of shattered faith and broken conviction, Peter had been the only who stayed. Rhodey and Vision had been a given, but both are gone so often they are barely visitors in their own home, ghosts of circumstances. Peter’s room, cluttered and confused, is the only other place beside Tony’s that looks lived-in, the only evidence that he isn’t alone in a penthouse meant for many.

He pulls into the garage, and sets the car to park, but it’s his brain that thrusts forward on the accelerator, to careen into overdrive.

Save the world, sure, he can do that. Fight monsters, and/or villains threatening to overtake New York, no problem, he’s something of an expert by now, a plethora of experiences tucked in and under his tool belt.

Be a father? Not even graduating top of his class from MIT three years early could prepare him for that. 

Peter is staring blankly through the spotless glass window of the car when Tony steps out, looking just as lost to a torrent of thoughts as the older had been just moments ago. Tony sighs, and makes his way over to the other side, waving his fingers to get the younger’s attention.

It’s almost comical how Peter startles, leaping up in his seat to flail against the side of the door — except, laughter had similarly deserted Tony alongside his usual confident control, and it’s all he can do to watch as the teen scrambles against the handle and forgets his own heightened strength, only to be whisked into the tide of inertia, teetering to a fall past the edge of his seat.

Peter catches himself before he can reach the ground. He bounds up on two feet, and sneaks a quick glance up at Tony, before veering his gaze back down to scuffed sneakers. 

Tony blinks, because he could have sworn there had been a flash of fear in the teen’s eyes, quick and darting, before fading into forced oblivion.

He shakes his head, attributes the occurrence to a mere trick of light.

The elevator ride up to the penthouse is expectedly silent, with Tony glancing out the corner of his eye to keep a cautious gaze on Peter’s hunched shoulders, and Peter staring determinedly at the polished floors underfoot. 

“Peter — ”

His next words drain away, unsaid, when the boy jerks to attention, wide, alarmed eyes finding their way to Tony. Belatedly, the engineer wonders if the teen is still suffering from the ramifications of sensory overload, if he’s still drowning in the overwhelming input through enhanced senses.

Tony frowns at the idea. It’s near impossible to get Peter to admit any sort of vulnerability, pain, or otherwise. Since he had met the teen, Peter had been adamant about not wanting to be belittled like a child, and shies away from any expression of “weakness” in an undeterred need to prove himself. 

The older smiles, wryly to himself, as Peter steps out the elevator to sink heavily into the couch, expression hidden under the ruffled mess of his own hair. 

In many ways, the younger is frustratingly similar to himself: afraid of failing, afraid of disappointing, afraid of revealing deep-set flaws that might detract in any way from others’ steadfast perspectives of them.

And incredibly bad at opening up to emotions shoved far, far behind unfaltering logic.

Maybe it’s that similarity that causes Tony to change tracks altogether, rounding up behind the kitchen counter to reach for the fridge.

“Are you hungry? We can have some — ” he grabs the first thing his fingers brush against, and squints at the label under the dim lights, “organic red ginseng extract.” 

A chuckle slips out, unguarded, and Tony whirls around to the source, just in time to see Peter shove a fist up to stifle the rest, mirth still tugging at his lips to a smile.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s the best sight Tony has seen all day. 

“Did Pepper leave this here?” he pretends to groan, wriggling his brows at the younger in ridiculous fashion. 

If there’s anything Tony hates more than being handed things, it’s embarrassing himself, even in front of those he’s sure wouldn’t judge him for it. Pride is his greatest strength and weakness, an overlapping gray area where he’d built his fortress to ward against unneeded emotions within. And yet here he is, making a fool of himself in front of his foster son, if only just to coax a little more laughter from Peter’s lips, to watch that grin take shape and flourish wide over parted teeth.

The teen giggles even as he nods, bobbing his head in time to the laughter. 

Tony can’t help the smile creeping up his own face, teasing tense muscles to relaxation. 

“Of course she did,” he mutters under his breath, and reaches for the box of cereal this time, because it’s never too late — or too early, he thinks, as he glances up at the clock that reads 1:30am — for breakfast food.

Peter quiets as he nears, that same rattled look seeping back into his expression as the mood descends to somber.

“Here,” he says, offering the teen a bowl.

The younger accepts it, almost hesitantly with open palms, something like dread in the downturn of his lips. 

“Look — ” Tony begins, sifting through the clutter in his brain to piece together a coherent enough sentence. 

He never gets the chance to find out what he’d have said, because Peter interrupts with a, “I’m sorry Mr Stark. I-I know I’m more trouble than I’m worth, and you aren’t obligated to deal with all of this — ” 

“Peter — ”

“No, I just… I just wanted to say I’m sorry, I know how much you sacrificed for me to be here, and I’m… I’m really grateful for all you’ve done, so I’ll save you the trouble from saying it and just take my stuff and go now.”

“What are you — ”

“Or… or, I can just go, because you bought most of what I have now anyways, so they’re really yours after all — ”

“Peter,” Tony cuts in, close enough to a yell that the teen jolts where he sits, and falls immediately silent. “Thank you. Now explain what you just said. You’re not going anywhere. Because you’re grounded for the next month, and F.R.I.D.A.Y. will send an alert to my phone if you leave the tower for anything but school.”

“I- what?”

Tony waggles a finger at the younger, trying his best to look as prim and disapproving as a parent should.

“That’s for staying out late without telling me, and going to a club of all places, honestly, Peter, you’re a minor, with a Mensa-qualifying IQ no less, you should have known better.”

Instead of the shame he had expected to see on the boy’s face, the teen only blinks slowly, as if busy working through hazy confusion.

“You’re not going to tell me to leave?”

Somewhere, from the ceiling, F.R.I.D.A.Y. glances out through mounted cameras at the mirrored looks of bewilderment on both males’ faces, before realization sinks in to wide eyes and parted gasps.

“And why would I do that?” Tony asks, gaze intent on the younger’s expression, watching as Peter chews his own lips to shreds and averts his eyes back to the floor. “Is that what has been bothering you?” 

“M-maybe. I know you’re mad, and I just thought that maybe you wouldn’t… wouldn’t want me around now that you know — ”

“Peter, I _am_ mad at you, but that’s not because you made me skip out on work, or whatever you’re thinking,” Tony frowns, pursing his lips. “I’m mad at you because that stunt you pulled could have gotten you into a lot of trouble. Legally _and_ physically. But mostly because you didn’t think to tell me you weren’t lying half-dead in a ditch somewhere.” 

There’s that guilt he had been waiting for now, twisting into sheepish countenance. “I’m sorry, Mr Stark, I didn’t mean to worry you.”

 Tony scoffs, but there’s no heat behind the action, just a pressed pretense of annoyance.

“You’re my kid now,” he pauses, because that’s as much of an explanation as he’s willing to give. Knows it’s enough, when Peter blinks and there’s glassy hope in his eyes, unfiltered and beseeching.

And then, “Stop calling me Mr Stark.”

The teen is quick to nod, obedient as always, in the way Tony has never been. Peter had been raised by good people, was brought up to understand responsibility, consequence, empathy, and a plethora of other imperative values the older still sorely lacks.

It doesn’t make any sense that the very same teen who helps old ladies cross roads and returns cats from the missing posters plastered messily around the neighborhood, would defy curfew for something as mediocre as underaged drinking. And curl up into a corner far away from all the action at that.

“Why did you do it?”

The younger hesitates, gaze buried in the bowl of untouched cereal in his hands. 

“Because,” there’s a pause, “it’s not… not something Peter Parker, geek extraordinaire, undercover superhero would have done.”

“What?”

“It’s not something _I_ would do,” he repeats, and glances back up at Tony, desperate and honest and forlorn, like a child who’d lost his way in a convoluted maze. “It’s not me. But I don’t want to be me anymore.” 

He blinks, and there’s the shimmer of something wet welling up just under his eyes, and Tony’s heart scrambles into his throat. There’s another thing he isn’t prepared to deal with: tears, and a crying child looking for comfort.

Tony is good with his hands, good with fixing things that seem irreparably broken, good with realizing things that seem possible only in the depths of imagination, ruling and working logic to his benefit. Emotions, on the other hand, is on a whole other spectrum that Tony is not fluent in; Pepper once likened him to a robot, depositing money in the cracks of a relationship to fill all the rifts in hopes they’ll miraculously heal without the emotional taxation. 

But Peter is his child, and there’s nothing quite like being a father to someone he desperately wants to protect in the palm of his hands; there’s a startling urge to be _better_. 

So when Peter sobs, Tony does the only thing he can think of. He pulls the boy in, close and tight, even as the younger shakes and whimpers and blows snot into his designer sweatshirt. 

“How can I be a hero if I can’t even save those closest to me?” A distressed choke, muffled through the fabric of Tony’s shirt. “How can I be worth anything when I let my only family die? Aunt May died, and I couldn’t do anything to help her. I don’t want to be me.” 

Tony runs his fingers through the younger’s hair, placating and uninterrupted, but his heart is a train wreck on rickety wheels, stuttering to a stop, lurching unsteadily against his ribs.

Because he _gets it_ , the feeling of complete and utter failure resonating in his bones. When it comes down to it, Tony has a 68% chance of saving the world from pesky villains, but that percentage dials down low to a near zero when it comes to keeping those he cares about around him.

Here, in a penthouse too wide and empty for two people, the evidence is aplenty. He’s tried, as hard as he can, in every way he knows how, put all his heart and soul into protecting them the best way he knows to, and all that he’s left with is the empty spaces they’d once filled, one by one darting out of reach.

“I know,” he finds himself saying. “I know, because I couldn’t save my family either. How can I be the great, legendary superhero _Iron Man_ , when I can’t keep anyone around me? How can I keep anyone safe, when the safest they are is when they’re the furthest away from me?”

It’s a simple equation in his mind: if an absolute nobody could fit the edges and curves of one Tony asshole Stark, then maybe the problem is _him_ after all, roughened corners and dipping loops to form an amorphous puzzle piece that belongs nowhere. His father hadn’t wanted him, his mom hadn’t been quite sure what to do with him, the family he’d once had all deserted him in the first brisk tug of wind. 

Genius or not, that many people couldn’t all have been wrong about him.

But Peter _isn’t_ him. Peter is a good kid, who fantasizes about saving the world and looking out for the little guy. Peter breathes compassion and his heart beats to the anthem of fiery courage. He’s that one person who stands tall between a crowd of hulking bullies and a one-eyed puppy chewing its own tail, if only to protect it for half a minute longer. 

Tony, on the other hand, is the bully, crowding everyone else out of the playground for the sake of their sanity.

The younger exhales shakily in his arms, and shifts, until his fists are no longer curled up around the creases of Tony’s shirt, but are pressing into his back instead. Even now, Tony laughs humorlessly, even in the midst of his own despair, Peter is trying to comfort Tony, to pull him out of a well of regrets too deep to see the bottom of. 

Even now, he’s still a better person than Tony could ever be. 

“There’s things, things that have happened, that we can’t change, that we couldn’t have changed, even if we reverse time over and over and over. Peter, it’s _not your fault_.” 

“And what happened to the Avengers isn’t yours.”

Tony freezes, fingers stilling. “What?” 

“I know you think what happened in Germany is your fault, but I also know you did what you thought was best to protect the people you love.”

Red-rimmed eyes and tear stained cheeks peek out at Tony, but there’s a resolute sort of conviction between the winding tracks of dried tears, in the firm set of his eyebrows and lips.

The older shakes his head, disbelievingly. “So did Steve.” 

It’s Peter’s turn to shake his head, bold and utterly serious. “You chose to listen to the voices of 117 countries. Steve chose to trust his conscience. Everyone trusts their conscience, but that doesn’t make him more right or objective than anyone else. The people of 117 countries spoke, and he wasn’t willing to listen. Trusting his conscience doesn’t make him a hero, you know. It just makes him a dictator.” 

There’s that honesty in Peter’s gaze again, but this time it’s with a sort of feverish hope, burning zealously as he speaks. Like he still believes in Tony, like he still looks up to Tony, in spite of everything that had rendered their house into an empty shell of what it once was. 

Tony will deny this later, but maybe there’s something burning in the corners of his eyes, wavering his vision into an increasingly blurry mess. 

“You’re not supposed to be comforting me,” he says, and oh fuck, his voice sounds like it’s been run through a shredder and lumped back together again, too thick and too frail all at once. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be comforting you, or yelling at you, or whatever.”

This time, Peter smiles. “Are you going to yell at me?”

Tony purses his lips, like he’s considering. Definitely not because he’s trying to stop the force of his own smile from steamrolling over and tearing his lips apart. “Nah. As much as it pains me to say this, you’re one of the best heroes I’ve ever met, and I _worked_ with golden boy Captain America. The strongest, and the bravest, and the most caring of them all too. F.R.I.D.A.Y., please delete all evidence of me saying that.”

Peter laughs, and it’s enough. Here, in an empty house, Tony has always resented the silence, but maybe it’s enough for the two of them to fill the silence, to bridge the gaps until they mend without a single scar.

“I still look up to you,” Peter admits, almost shyly, back into Tony’s shirt.

“And I still think you’re the best kid I could ever have,” Tony manages to say, without spluttering halfway, because _feelings_. “But you’re still grounded.”

“I know. That’s… not much of a resolution, is it?”

Tony doesn’t disagree, because if there’s one thing he knows from being a genius, it’s that some things don’t have answers. There’s no simple conclusion to close all loops into an uncontested _happy ending_. Only a million what-ifs to obsess over, tossing and turning hours into a restless midnight.

No, happy endings are for those who yearn to forget, to shut the book close on their pasts and leave it as it is, unchallenged and unchanging. Happy endings are for those who refuse to be better, to look to their futures with their footsteps etched stark in the past to appreciate how far they’ve come.

There’s no justifying reason for May’s death, or the Avengers’ downfall, or Peter, backing up into the corner of a club to shudder under the heavy blow of bass. There’s no time machine to catapult them back into the past to rework all their decisions, but then, if they could undo all they had done back then, would they still be the same people they are today?

There’s only this, swiveling back from the what could-have-beens to the what-could-be, and doing the best they can, as they always have.

“No,” he agrees, “but we’ll make it work.”

**Author's Note:**

> And there you have it, my first attempt at marvel cinematic universe fanfic (I'm IN LOVE with tony and peter's fumbling father-son dynamic). Hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> Title from the song _Dear Theodosia_  
>  Conversation about conscience (quoted below) based off of the-modern-typewriter on tumblr.
> 
>  
> 
> _“And who decides what’s right? You?_  
>  _“Yes. I trust my conscience.”_  
>  _“That doesn’t make you a hero, that makes you a dictator. Everyone trusts their conscience, that doesn’t magically make you right or more objective than anyone else.”_


End file.
